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Critical realism and historicalmaterialism as resources for criticalterrorism studiesEric Herring a & Doug Stokes ba School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, Universityof Bristol, Bristol, UKb School of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent,Canterbury, UK

Available online: 08 Apr 2011

To cite this article: Eric Herring & Doug Stokes (2011): Critical realism and historical materialism asresources for critical terrorism studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 4:1, 5-21

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Critical Studies on TerrorismVol. 4, No. 1, April 2011, 5–21

ARTICLE

Critical realism and historical materialism as resources for criticalterrorism studies

Eric Herringa,* and Doug Stokesb

aSchool of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK; bSchoolof Politics and International Relations, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Critical Terrorism Studies can be strengthened by scholarship that draws on a combina-tion of critical realism (CR) and historical materialism (HM). CR relates epistemolog-ical relativism (we can know the social only indirectly through our interpretation of it)to ontological realism (there is a powerfully influential social reality that includes butis much more than our knowledge claims about it) through judgemental rationalism(knowledge claims can be tested against social reality, although always in an indi-rect, interpreted and fallible way). We illustrate CR-informed HM’s value in relationto analysing capitalism’s constant remaking of the world, terrorism as an instrument ofcapitalist class rule and the reified thinking involved in the use of terrorism that it isinherently anti-emancipatory.

Keywords: war on terror; critical realism; historical materialism; capitalism; class

The central argument of this article is that Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) can bestrengthened by scholarship that combines critical realism (CR) as its philosophical andmethodological basis and historical materialism (HM) as its substantive theory of worldpolitics. This is not to argue that CTS should only be based on CR and HM: that wouldbe pointless, as it will not happen, and it would be undesirable, as these approaches do nothave a monopoly on insight. We are arguing that they provide insights and advantages oftheir own. CR and HM do not have to be combined, and it is possible to accept one andreject the other. What we are proposing here is that, when analysing the politics of ter-rorism, one can use HM as the historically specific substantive theory, while treating CRas a theoretical and methodological underlying set of assumptions or potential source ofmutual critique and reinforcement: used in these ways, it is an ‘underlabourer’ in the termsof Roy Bhaskar (1978, p. 10). Furthermore, both CR and HM are diverse and debated – forexample, the meaning and value of CR as underlabourer is disputed (e.g. Hostettler 2010,Patomäki 2010a, 2010b). Hence, neither CR nor HM needs to be treated as a fixed set ofcommitments to which one must subscribe wholly or exclusively.

We set out the body of our argument in three steps. First, we survey CTS by categorisingby approach all the articles (including longer symposium pieces) published in CriticalStudies on Terrorism (CST) (see Table 1).1 Discourse analysis (and especially thick andthin social constructivism) has predominated, but with around one-third of articles beingpositivist. In contrast, there have been no CR articles (cf. Stokes 2009) and only five (9%)

*Corresponding author. Email: eric.herring@bristol.ac.uk

ISSN 1753-9153 print/ISSN 1753-9161 online© 2011 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/17539153.2011.553384http://www.informaworld.com

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6 E. Herring and D. Stokes

could be described as being explicitly or implicitly grounded in HM, even though there isa long-standing body of HM critiques of Western counterterrorism and the West’s own useand sponsorship of terrorism (e.g. Chomsky and Herman 1979, Chomsky 1988, George1991, Stokes 2005, 2006, Blakeley 2009). The journal’s editors have actively encouragedsubmissions that draw on CR and HM such as this article and the special issue of whichit is a part (see also Jackson et al. 2009). It is up to those who think that CR and HMprovide important resources for CTS to make the case and we have tried to do that. Second,we outline the philosophical and methodological themes in CR that we find to be useful.Third, we argue that CR-informed HM provides a substantive theory that can contribute tothe ability of CTS to understand the world and the roles of terrorism and discourses aboutterrorism within it. In the conclusion, we set out the key components of the analyticalframework developed in this article and consider their implications for CTS research.

CTS critiques of terrorism and the war on terror

In recent years, the field of CTS has grown with a plethora of new books, articles andresearch seminars. This welcome development has undoubtedly been spurred by opposi-tion to much of the so-called War on Terror launched under the administration of GeorgeW. Bush Jr. His war on terror saw widespread, diverse armed involvement by the UnitedStates in the South involving airstrikes, special operations, invasions and occupations, aswell as extensive involvement in training of and joint operations with regular and mili-tia forces in the South. The Obama administration has abandoned the war on terror labelin favour of the phrase ‘overseas contingency operations’ (Burkeman 2009). It has statedits intention to shift the emphasis from force and unilateralism towards cooperation, mul-tilateralism and advancing universal norms in US foreign policy (Obama 2010). Indeed,Obama has been steadily reducing the US military presence and combat role in Iraq andhas declared his intention to do the same in Afghanistan, although thus far he has escalatedUS military involvement. There are also important continuities from Bush’s war on terror,such as the use of rendition – secret abductions and transfer of the abductees to prisonsin numerous third countries – as a counterterrorism tool (Miller 2009). The elevation of‘counterterrorism’ to the status of a central dogma of governance globally has had effectsworldwide and has provided actors with a new ideological resource, which means that thereis a continuing need for CTS critiques.

CTS scholars have gone about their critique of the war on terror in widely varyingways. We examine post-structuralist, thick social constructivist, thin social constructivistand positivist approaches in turn, with a view to then identifying how CR or HM mayenhance their work.

Only two CST articles (3%) are premised on the notion that the discursive exhauststhe social (see Table 1). From this post-structuralist perspective, grounded in the workof Judith Butler (1993) among others, discourse refers to the inter-subjective production,reproduction and alteration of always open, incomplete systems of meaning through theperformance of linguistic and non-linguistic practices. Discourses create binaries of sup-posedly separate and opposite subjectivities with one side of the binary represented aspositive and the other negative. The ‘materialisation’, as Butler puts it, of discourses in theform of their reiteration means that such production of meaning is by no means purely vol-untaristic, but is actually considerably constrained. Nevertheless, meaning is unstable andopen to challenge. Laura Shepherd (2008, p. 216), in stating that her goal is to promote‘a politics resistant to the dominant discourse of security/counterterrorism in the West’,

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Critical Studies on Terrorism 7

Tabl

e1.

Sur

vey

ofar

ticl

esin

Cri

tica

lStu

dies

onTe

rror

ism

,1(1

)–3(

2).

Post

-str

uctu

rali

stT

hick

soci

alco

nstr

uctiv

ist

Thi

nso

cial

cons

truc

tivis

tPo

sitiv

ist

Cri

tica

lrea

list

His

tori

calm

ater

iali

st

Dis

cour

seas

lang

uage

and

non-

ling

uist

icpr

acti

ces

that

exha

ust

the

soci

al:m

ainl

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tive

and

cons

titu

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lso

inst

rum

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l

Dis

cour

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lang

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ainl

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and

cons

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(for

mos

t)in

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lang

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ainl

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men

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tals

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Lan

guag

eco

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pond

sto

/ap

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imat

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cial

real

ity

Kno

wle

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ms

can

bete

sted

agai

nst

soci

alre

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thou

ghal

way

sin

anin

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nter

pret

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ms

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3%(2

arti

cles

:She

pher

d20

08,K

olås

2010

)36

%(2

1ar

ticl

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urke

2008

,Boo

th20

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odds

2008

,Eri

ckso

n20

08,

Jack

son

2008

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vis

2008

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hnst

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ulai

kaan

dD

ougl

ass

2008

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dib-

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hadd

am20

09,

Al-

Sum

aite

tal.

2009

,A

lthe

ide

2009

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rke

2009

,Hos

kins

and

O’L

ough

lin

2009

,H

utch

ings

and

Mia

zhev

ich

2009

,Lee

2009

,M

iche

lsen

2009

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nsso

n20

09,B

arto

lucc

i201

0,de

Gra

afan

dde

Gra

aff

2010

,M

ontg

omer

y20

10,

Zul

aika

2010

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21%

(12

arti

cles

:Bar

nidg

e20

08,F

oste

ran

dB

utle

r20

08,S

harl

ach

2008

,H

oski

ng20

09,L

ee20

09,

Ori

ola

2009

,Pap

pe20

09,

Tir

man

2009

,Mac

Gin

ty20

10,N

azir

2010

,S

hana

han

2010

,Toi

vane

n20

10)

31%

(18

arti

cles

:Gel

tzer

2008

,Gue

lke

2008

,R

ekaw

ek20

08,S

luka

2008

,Sto

hl20

08,

Cha

dwic

k20

09,D

ragh

ici

2009

,Kap

lan

2009

,Rap

in20

09,R

yan

and

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itze

r20

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icek

2009

,Ani

ng20

10,J

acob

y20

10,M

alkk

i20

10,O

jane

n20

10,

Qur

eshi

2010

,San

tos

2010

,Van

Don

gen

2010

)

0%(0

arti

cles

)9%

(5ar

ticl

es:B

lake

ley

2008

,Her

ring

2008

,M

ille

ran

dM

ills

2009

,Sor

ense

n20

09,

Kee

nan

2010

)

Not

es:

The

tabl

ein

clud

esal

lar

ticl

esan

dlo

nger

sym

posi

umpa

pers

.Ite

ms

refe

rred

toin

the

tabl

ean

din

thes

eno

tes

but

not

inth

ebo

dyof

our

text

are

not

list

edin

our

bibl

iogr

aphy

toav

oid

over

burd

enin

git

.The

item

sdo

notn

eces

sari

lyfa

llne

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into

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vari

ous

cate

gori

es.O

nem

ight

argu

eth

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icul

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bein

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next

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uctiv

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truc

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cate

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),bu

titw

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fficu

ltto

argu

eth

atan

yar

ticl

esh

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bem

oved

two

orm

ore

cate

gori

esac

ross

the

tabl

e.W

eha

veex

clud

edfr

omth

eta

ble

arti

cles

that

self

-ide

ntif

yas

exte

rnal

voic

escr

itic

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the

CT

Spr

ojec

tpe

rse

(Hor

gan

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and

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hard

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and

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ks20

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We

have

incl

uded

all

arti

cles

that

are

not

expl

icit

lypo

siti

oned

byth

eir

auth

ors

asch

alle

nges

toC

TS

onth

egr

ound

sth

at,i

fth

eir

auth

ors

did

not

see

thei

rpa

pers

asco

ntri

buti

ons

toC

TS

,itw

ould

bera

ther

odd

tosu

bmit

the

pape

rsto

,and

have

them

acce

pted

for

publ

icat

ion,

ina

jour

nalc

alle

dC

riti

calS

tudi

eson

Terr

oris

m.W

eid

enti

fied

four

arti

cles

inth

ejo

urna

lth

atw

ere

expl

icit

lyai

med

aten

hanc

ing

the

coun

tert

erro

rist

poli

cies

ofW

este

rnst

ates

(Fos

ter

and

But

ler

2008

,Rek

awek

2008

,de

Gra

afan

dde

Gra

aff

2010

,Mal

kki2

010)

.As

such

wou

ldha

vebe

enat

hom

ein

any

MT

Sjo

urna

l.In

the

intr

oduc

tion

toth

efi

rsti

ssue

ofth

ejo

urna

l,th

eed

itor

ialt

eam

stat

edth

atth

eydi

dno

twan

tto

prom

ote

aC

TS

–MT

Sbi

furc

atio

n(B

reen

Sm

yth

etal

.200

8,pp

.2–3

).W

epr

esum

eth

ein

clus

ion

ofth

ese

arti

cles

inth

ejo

urna

lrefl

ects

this

.

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8 E. Herring and D. Stokes

showed that even an explicitly post-structuralist perspective is compatible with an agentic,instrumental use of discourse.

The largest group of CST articles – 36% – is thick social constructivist. These 21articles frame discourse differently from post-structuralists as spoken and written lan-guage alone (and hence excluding such things as physical actions and non-verbal images),with language being the means by which the social is constructed intersubjectively. Theideas of Michel Foucault, especially those in his earlier work, are implicit in these articlesand referred to directly in some of them. Foucault stated that his ‘archaeology of knowl-edge’ is aimed at revealing the ‘relations between discursive formations and non-discursivedomains (institutions, political events, economic practices and processes)’ (1972, p. 162,see also 1991, pp. 58–59; Hardy 2010). Recurrent themes feature among these articles.There are references to terrorism as a social reality and empirical testing of claims: ‘objec-tively the danger [to the West from non-state terrorism] is ... minimal’ (Zulaika andDouglass 2008, p. 29); ‘non-terror can become a terrorism problem and non-risk ideo-logically risky, while at the same time real threats go undetected’ (Zulaika 2008, p. 247);‘there is a phenomenon called terrorism’ (Burke 2008, p. 39); and ‘the key terms relat-ing to terrorism ... all refer to something real’ (Booth 2008, p. 72). Some in this groupfocus exclusively on language as productive of meaning and constitutive of the subjectivi-ties bound up with discourses and restrict themselves to destabilising dominant discourses(e.g. Hutchings and Miazhevich 2009). However, most see language as primarily produc-tive and constitutive, but also at times instrumental (capable of use by agents in the pursuitof goals). For example, Hank Johnston (2008) analysed the ‘strategic use of ideas’ (fram-ing) as well as cultural determination/performance, whereas Richard Jackson (2008, p.379) went further than most in seeing the war on terror discourse as ‘a deliberate means ofdistraction or misdirection from uncomfortable subjects or contrasting viewpoints’. Thereare also repeated references to the interests served instrumentally (as opposed to beingconstituted) by discourses: ‘the alleged enemies feed rhetorically into one another’s inter-ests’ (Zulaika and Douglass 2008, p. 29); and counterterrorism discourses are used by theUnited States and United Kingdom as ‘global/imperial powers’ (Erickson 2008, p. 344).Causal claims also feature in these articles: for example, ‘In general, a low level of per-formative power has a more rapidly neutralising effect on radicalisation than large-scale,public counter-terrorism efforts’ (de Graaf and de Graaff 2010, p. 173).

Thin social constructivism defines discourse in relation to language and sees it asmainly instrumental and descriptive while in most cases still leaving space for discoursesto be productive and constitutive. Twenty-one per cent of articles (12 in total) publishedin CST fall into this category. Jeffrey Sluka (2008, pp. 178, 181) represents terrorism asbeing ‘both an objective reality and a cultural construct’, with the concept’s use ‘propa-gandistic’ and ‘fuelled by vested interests’. Ilan Pappe (2009, pp. 127, 128, 144) arguedthat ‘the construction of the equation of Palestinian nationalism with terrorism’ is ‘PR’and a ‘travesty’, which has the effect of justifying ‘Israeli crimes and atrocities as actsof self-defence’. Reetta Toivanen (2010, pp. 277–278, 281) argued that ‘counterterrorismmechanisms become a “validation” for the violation of human rights’ through ‘othering’.For Temitope Oriola (2009, p. 257), the ‘misconstruing of human rights for citizenshiprights’ in Canadian counterterrorism policy is part of a process of creating ‘an “internalOther”’. According to John Tirman (2009, pp. 527, 536), narratives ‘reflect and reinforcethe interests of dominant groups’. He sees US-Iranian reconciliation as being hindered bynational narratives and advocates an ‘attempt to write a new, common narrative’ (p. 527).The peace process in the Philippines has been damaged by the Global War on Terror,according to Soliman Santos, Jr. (2010). He objects to the ‘dominant counter-terrorism

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Critical Studies on Terrorism 9

analysis and discourse’ (2010, p. 138) and argues that organisations should be labelled ter-rorist only if they use terrorist tactics systematically. Similarly, Timothy Shanahan (2010,p. 185) is of the view that we should ‘see terrorism for what it is, i.e., merely a particulartactic for influencing behaviour, rather than, in itself, a special evil’. It can be seen thatthe central theme in this literature is opposition to the often deliberate and broad misappli-cation of the label ‘terrorism’ in the service of interests and in the justification of humanrights abuses.

Positivism underpins 31% of CTS articles (18 in total): language is treated as cor-responding to or approximating social reality. The word ‘discourse’ is used to meansimply a way of talking about something that may be true or false depending on howempirically accurate it is. Michael Stohl (2008) disputed the empirical basis of what hesees as numerous myths, including every element of the claim that terrorists are exclu-sively non-governmental criminals and madmen bent on a futile mission to create chaos.Asim Qureshi (2010, p. 61) examined the use of secret detention and rendition in theHorn of Africa to show that there is an African–Western alliance for which ‘rights, jus-tice and the rule of law take second place to the perceived political ambitions of theUS’. Tim Jacoby (2010, pp. 99, 110) makes a similar claim in portraying a ‘triangularconcert of agents from the Turkish state’s intelligence and special-forces organisations,operatives from Washington, and right-wing activists and paramilitaries’. He providesempirical evidence that these three ‘have worked in concert to a point where at timesthey become indistinguishable from one another’. Their actions include ‘targeting individ-uals of symbolic value’ and ‘organising collective events to terrorise opponents’, and thewar on terror has helped them resist reform as part of the European Union harmonisationprocess.

It can be seen from this survey that there is a great deal of agreement across theseperspectives that Western counterterrorism policies overstate the threat from non-state ter-rorism; are counterproductive if the goal is reducing the threat from non-state terrorism;and are damaging to human rights and conflict resolution. The articles also provide evi-dence of Western and especially US resort to or complicity in terrorism through allianceswith local actors in many parts of the world. Finally, analysis of language in the constitu-tion of hegemony or in the service of interests predominates. These substantive positionsare the main contribution made by CTS. We now turn to how CR and HM might relate to,and be a resource for the various theoretical perspectives within CTS.

In a classic work, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001, p. xviii) made a post-structuralist case (referenced in some of the social constructivist CST articles) for ‘a newleft-wing hegemonic project’ in which redistribution and recognition are combined in ‘rad-ical and plural democracy’ through which class, gender, racial and environmental strugglesare articulated. Their writings are replete with unequivocal statements about the nature ofthe social, such as: ‘intervention by the state at ever broader levels of social reproductionhas been accompanied by a growing bureaucratization of its practices, which has come toconstitute, along with commodification, one of the fundamental sources of inequalities andconflicts’ (2001, p. 162). This suggests that even a post-structuralist critique of the waron terror could be linked to a political project that included the issues of class, the stateand neoliberal capitalism, and could involve historically specific claims about the natureof social reality. Furthermore, post-structuralism and CR are both epistemologically rela-tivist and, as we go on to discuss, some in CR are taking an increasing interest in semiosis.However, post-structuralists, on the one hand, and advocates of CR and HM, on the other,are more likely to emphasise their theoretical differences over ontology, whether the dis-cursive exhausts the social, how and whether one can choose between knowledge claims

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10 E. Herring and D. Stokes

and whether one can have a substantive theory of world politics (see Sayer 2000, Joseph2011, Porpora 2011).

There is much more affinity between the thick and thin social constructivists’ perspec-tive and both CR and HM. CR offers a theorisation of social reality and its relationshipsto knowledge claims and judgements about them, whereas HM provides a substantive the-ory of the nature of interests, including class-related imperial ones, which the CTS socialconstructivists have not developed. Some scholars have sought to remedy the insufficientattention paid by CR to semiosis defined as ‘the intersubjective production of mean-ing’ through verbal, visual, aural and other sensory means (Fairclough et al. 2010, seealso Fairclough 1992, 2003). Only one CST article has used this definition of semiosis:it examines the instrumental use of discourse among the US political elite ‘to justifymilitary interventions and security controls’ and also ‘to further domestic agendas andto target potentially “dangerous” groups’ (Bartolucci 2010, p. 131). This subsumes thediscourse-as-language approach of CTS thick social constructivists, but it stops short ofthe post-structuralist position that the discursive exhausts the social. Semiosis, in its CR-informed version, involves referents (social realities such as the experience of being anon-combatant influenced through terror produced by violence or the threat of it), as wellas signifiers (the form of a sign such as the label ‘terrorism’) and signifieds (the conceptof being a non-combatant influenced through terror produced by violence or the threat ofit). Hence, the challenge and opportunity is two way: to understand how semiosis is con-strained and enabled by the extra-semiotic aspects of persons and social relations and thephysical world and vice versa (Fairclough et al. 2010, pp. 206–207; see also Sayer 2000,p. 62; Joseph and Robert 2004).

Advocates of CR generally position CR in opposition to positivism (see Joseph 2011,Porpora 2011). This is because, among other things, positivism sees events as things to beexplained by their regularly preceding causes and expressed as generalisations, whereas CRargues that numerous and changing social mechanisms interact to generate causal tenden-cies. In addition, positivists assume that what exists can be known directly by observation,whereas CR is, as indicated above, epistemologically relativist. However, the CST articleswe have surveyed are overwhelmingly empirical and not aimed particularly at deterministicgeneralisations. Theirs is not a stark positivism, as they are couched in qualitative and his-torically specific narratives that have much in common with the approach favoured in CRin seeking to exercise judgemental rationalism in the identification of causal tendencies.Furthermore, in HM they could find a theory to help them explain why strategic relation-ships such as those between US agents and Turkish Special Forces and paramilitaries existand what interests they serve.

In sum, there are various points of potential compatibility between most of the CTSas it has developed thus far (especially its social constructivist variants) and both CR andHM. We now expand on what we mean by CR and HM and how they relate to CTS and thepolitics of terrorism.

Critical Realism as a philosophical and methodological resource for CTS

Although there are many variants of CR, certain core elements can be identified. RoyBhaskar, the most important figure in the development of CR, has argued that ‘criticalrealism claims to be able to combine and reconcile ontological realism, epistemologicalrelativism and judgemental rationalism’ (1998, p. xi). This triumvirate is a standard fea-ture of CR, but how they are combined and reconciled varies (e.g. Danermark et al. 2002,Wight 2006, Joseph 2011, Porpora 2011). CR relates epistemological relativism (we can

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know the social only indirectly through our interpretation of it) to ontological realism (thereis a powerfully influential social reality that includes but is much more than our knowledgeclaims about it) through judgemental rationalism (knowledge claims can be tested againstsocial reality, although always in an indirect, interpreted and fallible way). CR tends torefer to ontological social reality as ‘mind-independent’. This can easily be misunderstoodto mean ‘independent of all minds’, but this is not so. As Bhaskar has stated, ‘Social struc-tures, unlike natural structures, do not exist independently of the agents’ conceptions ofwhat they are doing in their activity’ (1989b, p. 38; see also pp. 174–175). This is in linewith Richard Rorty’s (1989, p. 5) position that: ‘Truth cannot be out there – cannot existindependently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. Theworld is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the worldcan be true or false.’ What CR is getting at is that the social world has effects that farexceed the claimed knowledge that we create about it; that our claimed knowledge canonly be interpreted, indirect and fallible; but also that the social world provides tests ofthat claimed knowledge (although our claimed knowledge of those tests is again inevitablyinterpreted, indirect and fallible). To use a standard example, most of those who work maythink they are doing so simply to earn money, with no understanding that they may bereproducing neoliberal globalisation and attempting to earn money in ways that conflictwith its reproduction and which could have significant costs for them.

In this framework of analysis, causal relations represent tendencies rather than reliableassociations of A causing B. This pattern of tendencies is seen to be the result of under-lying structures to social reality in which relations between objects are part of an opensystem containing many objects and relations (see Bhaskar 1978, ch. 2). There is moreto reality than direct causal relations between events – there are unrealised causal pow-ers (CR calls this the real), as well as realised causal powers (CR calls this the actual).The social world operates even if we are not aware of its patterns of operation or whythose patterns exist. For example, particular aspects of capital accumulation may tend tobe associated with increases in state terrorism, and that will be true even if we do nothave claimed knowledge or a discourse that it is true. This demonstrates a fundamentallimitation of discourse analysis as seeing the social as exhausted by existing discourses:we can examine existing discourses but also have to look beyond them. Furthermore, asAndrew Sayer (2000, p. 2) pointed out, the very fallibility of our knowledge is evidence forthe existence of a social reality that exists independently of particular knowledge claimsabout it. For example, a substantial minority of the US public, when polled, stated thatthey thought that Iraq and al-Qaeda had been closely linked before 9/11, that world pub-lic opinion supported the US-led invasion of Iraq and that weapons of mass destruction(WMD) had been found after the invasion (Kull et al. 2003–04). The position that thesethree knowledge claims are false is fallible and necessarily an indirect social construction,but we have a relatively high degree of confidence that they are false. Part of what givesus that confidence is not only signifiers and signifieds but also referents, that is, the actualstate of Iraq–al-Qaeda relations, negative attitudes worldwide to the invasion and failureto find physical WMD objects. These referents are making it significantly harder to turnthese three minority ‘construals’ (knowledge claims) into ‘constructions’ (the establish-ment of intersubjective meaning) that reach beyond that minority (Fairclough et al. 2010,pp. 209–210).

In CR, social structures are established through human practices which then pre-existand both constrain and enable subsequent human practices. At the same time, those struc-tures are maintained, altered or transformed through the practices of human agents whocan be partly or wholly unaware of the effects they are having. This is what Bhaskar (1986,

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pp. 11–129; see also Danermark et al. 2002, pp. 180–181, 206) calls the transformationalmodel of social activity. Therefore, for example, US soldiers may have believed themselvesto be fighting in Iraq for a variety of reasons (patriotism, fighting ‘Islamic terrorism’ andso on) or framed their involvement in such terms. However, the long-standing practices ofWestern imperialism in the Middle East predate their participation, while their participa-tion both reinforces and changes these social structures, even if they are not conscious of,and indeed reject, the discourses of imperialism.

By adopting a realist ontology, we enable analyses that seek to create knowledge aboutthe structures at work in relation to terrorism and counterterrorism. In other words, weget ontological depth. By conceiving of social structure in these terms, we can also exer-cise judgemental rationalism and assess the relative value of different explanations ofthose structures. As Bhaskar (1989a, p. 3) has argued, we can only ‘understand – andso change – the social world if we identify the structures at work that generate thoseevents or discourses’. If we adopt an epistemological relativism without a correspond-ing realist ontology, we merely have competing interpretations, unless there is an attemptat some kind of middle way that draws on positivism (for a critique of that option, seeJoseph (2011) and Porpora (2011)). It is not enough to simply point out the nature ofdominant modes of representation as contingent social constructions, especially when thearchitects of the hegemonic discourses deployed acknowledge the instrumental nature oftheir deployment. As Paul Wolfowitz, the former US Deputy Defence Secretary, argued,the Bush Administration used the WMD discourse as the main justification for invadingIraq as it was the one ‘issue that everyone could agree on’ (quoted in AP 2003). Ourargument does not mean that we need to lapse into a reductionism in which discoursesare mere epiphenomena of underlying interests. Discourses operate at two levels: at onelevel, they are non-instrumental and produce identities and practices, and at another, theyare the instruments of social agents as ideologies, propaganda, persuasion and so on, andthose agents can invent, alter or even replace them. Indeed, as we have shown, althoughthe emphasis varies, the notion that discourses can be both productive and instrumental isquite widespread in CTS, which indicates an important point of agreement with CR.

Historical materialism as a substantive theoretical resource for CTS

We have illustrated how CR provides ways in general philosophical and methodologicalterms of relating structured reality to discourses and knowledge claims regarding terrorism,counterterrorism and associated interests. The next step is to connect them to a substantivetheory of world politics. HM and CR are well suited to being integrated with each other,because HM in the non-reductionist, non-economistic and non-teleological form we favourcomfortably accommodates the central commitments of CR.2 Like CR, HM understandsthat there is much more to the social than discourse; that underlying social mechanismsgenerate change in the form of causal tendencies; and that social relations are inherentlydynamic and changing. This final point, that social relations contain realised and unrealisedpotential within them for change, makes the CR–HM combination particularly congenialto the commitment of CTS to emancipatory politics and not taking the current order ofthings for granted as something that will continue into the future. It provides tools forunderstanding how that change occurs, something that requires much more than discourseanalysis alone.

HM is sensitive to the characteristics of particular phenomena across scales from themicropolitics of the profit margins in particular transactions through to the macro scale ofthe nature of entire historical eras, and hence it can lend itself to the multiscalar analysis

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of terrorism and political economy called for by Hayward (2011). This is the ‘historical’aspect of HM. The ‘materialism’ part refers to its prioritisation of analysis of the classand productive basis of societies in ways which do not merely reduce everything to eco-nomics and which see production as involving a wide range of social relations (Josephand Kennedy 2000). This is a rather different use of the term ‘material’ as used in CRand discourse analysis (indicating the establishment of some element of social reality) andother uses (referring to wealth, physical objects or as a counterpoint to the notion of theideational). HM is a political economy approach in that it sees the political and economicas mutually constitutive rather than spheres that can be analysed separately, or at least whenanalysed separately must then be brought together again to be understood properly. To seecapitalism simply as an economic system, separate from politics, culture, consciousnessand the natural world would be fundamentally misleading. It entails entire ways of being,thinking and feeling that may be suited to, or have contradictory effects on, its functioning.

HM seeks to analyse the dominant discourses that have enabled state and non-stateterrorism and the costly, repressive practices of much of so-called counterterrorism. HMalso seeks to relate these discursive practices to sustained analysis of the class and otherinterests and social relations within capitalism. This includes consideration of how theyare used deliberately and instrumentally. Furthermore, adoption of an HM perspective canfacilitate a shift from Western-centrism and state-centrism to looking at multiple perspec-tives, with the state re-theorised in the context of the internationalisation of capitalismand class relations at all levels, from the local to the global. CTS scholars have madecommendable efforts to put state terrorism (including that used or sponsored by liberaldemocracies) on the agenda, while also not losing sight of the use of terrorism by Western,non-Western and anti-Western non-state actors (e.g. Blakeley 2010).3 The state needs tobe put on the agenda in a particular way, that is, in the context of a wider analysis ofclass and capital that considers all of them as part of the historically specific dynamics ofneoliberal capitalist globalisation (e.g. Blakeley 2009, Herring 2010, Maher and Thomson2011, McKeown 2011). In this way, we can move beyond simplistic, static, decontextu-alised dichotomies of state versus non-state terrorism, the political versus the economicand terrorist political violence versus criminal economic violence. All these dichotomiesfeature strongly in terrorism studies, both mainstream and critical. HM-informed analysis,as Anthony McKeown (2011) demonstrated, moves the focus away from seeing terrorismand counterterrorism as involving discrete events to be compared towards understandingthe events as part of an interconnected, dynamically unfolding process of remaking socialrelations.

Having set out some of the basic features of CR-informed HM for thinking about ter-rorism and counterterrorism, we elaborate with three related illustrations of what CTS cangain. The first is an enhanced understanding of how change occurs in the contemporary eraof global neoliberalisation. The second is the opening up of a research agenda on terrorismas an instrument of capitalist class rule: in case it needs to be said this can be done withoutmaking the mistake of assuming that all terrorism serves that function. The third is theargument that terrorism cannot be emancipatory as a means of resisting global neoliber-alisation and capitalist class rule, in the sense that terrorism involves the kind of reifiedthinking that is inherently anti-emancipatory and congenial to capitalism.

Capitalism – and mainstream thought – as forces for change

The notion that CTS envisages a different world and contributes to the transformation of theexisting one, whereas MTS merely operates within the existing frame of reference to solve

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problems in defence of the status quo, is not justified. Robert W. Cox (1981, pp. 128–130)distinguished between problem-solving theory and critical theory in international politi-cal economy (IPE), and this has been taken up almost universally in CTS and in CriticalSecurity Studies more generally. However, as Paul Cammack (2007) has argued, main-stream thinking about IPE has been dramatically remaking the world, most notably throughthe project of neoliberalisation which itself has gone through multiple phases and forms asit has sought to overcome resistance in the existing order. Truly, mainstream thought hastaken to heart that the point is to change the world, not merely understand it. The reason forthis is that MTS, just like mainstream IPE, is a handmaiden of an actually existing revolu-tionary force, that is, capitalism, and contemporary global neoliberalisation in particular.As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ([1848] 1996, pp. 4–5) wrote famously:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,hence the relations of production, and therefore social relations as a whole. By contrast the firstcondition of existence of all earlier manufacturing classes was the unaltered maintenance ofthe old mode of production. The continual transformation of production, the uninterruptedconvulsion of all social conditions, a perpetual uncertainty and motion distinguish the epochof the bourgeoisie from all earlier ones. All the settled, age-old relations with their train oftime-honoured preconceptions are dissolved; all newly formed ones become outmoded beforethey can ossify. . . . It forces all nations to adopt the bourgeois mode of production or gounder; it forces them to introduce so-called civilisation amongst themselves, i.e., to becomebourgeois. In a phrase, it creates a world in its own image.

Capitalism, and in particular the drive to ensure profit through the continued and suffi-ciently rapid circulation of capital, motivates this overthrowing and remaking of the socialorder (Harvey 2010a, 2010b). Individual capitalists are not particularly motivated to servecapitalism: they pursue their own profit. Hence, the interests of particular capitalists arenot necessarily in harmony with capitalism per se, and this is where the regulatory roleof states and international institutions can come into play (see Maher and Thomson 2011,McKeown 2011). Such valuable ideas are the stock in trade of HM thought, but they haverarely been drawn upon by CTS.

HM also provides substantive understandings of the dynamics of change that relateto the CR notion at the philosophical level of a transformational model of social activity.If CTS does not understand how ontological reality has to be for terrorism to be possi-ble (see McKeown 2011), then its understanding of manifestations of terrorism is limitedand its thinking is of the fragmentary type for which problem-solving theory is criticised.Furthermore, CTS has a broad commitment to emancipatory change and so it needs toconsider the emancipatory potential of the most potent already-existing sources of changeand transformation. HM has long reflected on the ways in which the dynamism of capital-ism and its related social form of liberalism and its variants can be progressive as well asreactionary in their implications.

Terrorism as an instrument of capitalist class rule

As indicated above, capitalism has an inherent dynamic of change – Particular elementsof the capitalist ruling class – composed of alliances of owners and managers of capital,state elites and wider social elites seek to resist or work with that dynamic of changewhile protecting and advancing their own interests. There are numerous situations in whichterrorism may be deployed as an instrument of the capitalist ruling class, and here webriefly outline four which may overlap and interact in reality.

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First, it can be used as part of a process of shattering social formations that arepre-capitalist or capitalist in ways that are resistant to the more rapid circulation of capital.For example, terrorism, deployed by the state, by corporations or by fractions of elites inalliance with elements of urban or rural labour and reaffirmed through the use of the law,may be particularly useful for overcoming the hindrance to capital accumulation posedby small-scale subsistence farming. This process of breaking up such social formationsto separate labour from the ownership of land and other means of production was called‘primitive accumulation’ by Marx and rethought by Harvey as ‘accumulation by dispos-session’ (Marx [1890] 1990, Part 8; Harvey 2005, Maher and Thomson 2011, McKeown2011). It can be seen immediately that the distinctions between state and non-state terror-ism and between the political and economic violence get in the way of understanding this,as such violence blurs all of these boundaries.

Second, the ruling class of rentier states and in rentier economies can be inclinedtowards using terrorism domestically, whether generally or selectively. Rentier statesrely substantially on income received from foreign sources such as by exporting natu-ral resources and by accepting aid payments, whereas rentier economies are composedof a significant degree of rentier state expenditure (Beblawi and Luciani 1987). The rul-ing class in such cases can more readily employ terror tactics because they are relativelyfree from the constraints of having to root themselves in, and hence not alienate, domesticsociety. This rentier position gave Saddam Hussein a relatively free hand in Iraq, for exam-ple, in deploying terror to cow the population generally and in relation to the Kurdish andShia rebellions. Repression in post-invasion Iraq continues to be facilitated by the rentierposition of elites.

Third, the use of domestic terrorism may be part of an essentially domestic responseof a ruling-class formation to being destabilised by external pressure to neoliberaliseand, in particular, to deregulate and privatise the economy and reduce welfare provision(McKeown 2011). Despite the neoliberal ideology that this is merely freeing individuals toact entrepreneurially and choose how to spend their own money rather than have it spentfor them by the state, the process of neoliberalisation produces many losers. Ruling-classformations within particular states can use terror as one of their means of dealing withactual or potential opposition to that process. For example, although the wars in the formerYugoslavia and Rwanda are often seen primarily in relation to ethnicity, the ruling elitesof both states faced severe political problems due to requirements for them to engage instructural adjustment towards neoliberalism (Woodward 1995, Prunier 1995). These rulingelites responded to their inability to deliver in financial, service and programmatic termsby redirecting hostility from themselves towards identity-based others and licensing themost socially marginal (Mueller 2000) to go on the rampage, terrorising and dispossessinganyone who might even potentially oppose those elites.

Fourth, the use of domestic terrorism by a ruling-class formation can be conductedas part of a strategic alliance in which an external actor plays a powerful role. This can beseen in the case of the conduct in recent decades of US-backed state terrorism in Colombia,although the state is formally liberal democratic (Stokes 2006, Maher and Thomson 2011).This kind of US-backed class-based terrorism involving state, corporate and paramilitaryactors to promote an appropriate climate for United States and wider international cap-italist investment has a long history across Latin America, but also elsewhere such asIndonesia under Suharto or Iran under the Shah (Chomsky and Herman 1979, Blakeley2009, McKeown 2011).

All four situations outlined – accumulation by dispossession, rentier repression, domes-tic stabilisation in response to externally driven neoliberalisation and externally backed

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class repression – are ones in which terrorism can be functional for class rule undercapitalism. A CR-informed approach understands that the goal of the analysis is to useour knowledge of what exists to gain insights into the deeper structures of existing andpotential social relations. The focus is on identifying changing but not fixed relations, notleast because of human capacity to reflect. We see that there is not a necessary relation-ship between capitalism and terrorism, but that capitalism does contain propensities forit. Certainly, terrorism has had its place in overcoming actual or potential opposition tocapital accumulation or to particular capitalist elites, but legitimacy and consent are morelikely to serve their interests as measured by their most secure and maximal accumulationof capital. A thoroughly internalised acceptance of capitalist modes of being would makedisciplining through terrorism superfluous in many respects.

Terrorism as an expression of reified thinking congenial to capitalism

Even terrorism that is aimed at opposing capitalism per se, or particular expressions of it,can also serve capitalist class rule. Anti-capitalist terrorism has ranged widely from therevolutionary terrorism of small groups trying to provoke and lay bare what they see as theessentially repressive nature of the capitalist state, to Stalin’s vast system of state terrorism,to local, ad hoc acts against accumulation by dispossession. Jonathan Joseph (2011) drawson a classic essay by Leon Trotsky (1911) to argue that the use of terrorism by those resist-ing capitalism or aspects of it shows a failure to understand that terrorism itself is foundedon the kind of reified thinking that facilitates and is facilitated by capitalism. Reificationlies in seeing a social relation as a thing or an object outside of ourselves and outside ofsocial relations. The reasoning behind Joseph’s argument is that supposedly revolutionaryterrorism is premised on the fallacy that emancipation can be produced by a revolutionaryvanguard when the social conditions are not ripe for participation of the mass of societyin that revolutionary change (see also Trotsky 1909). It rests on the assumption that theapparatus of capitalist class rule does not have deep social roots and can be destroyed by alittle bit of violence and a lot of fear. For HM, this is a fallacy, as emancipation, whateverspecific content it may end up having, would have to involve change in the dialecticallyrelated individual consciousnesses and collective social relations of actively engaged sub-jects. To put it another way, emancipation is not something that can be done for you or toyou or with your role limited to being an onlooker to a spectacle. This is different fromarguing that terrorism always fails or cannot achieve objectives as part of a wider struggle.

In critiquing terrorism as an expression of reification, Joseph has opened up a wayof grounding CTS more firmly in normative terms. It also provides space to revisit thenormative relationship between HM and terrorism and provides good grounds for rejectingany claim that the type of HM articulated here is soft on terrorism when those using it claimthat it is for revolutionary anti-capitalist purposes. Many adherents of HM have rejected thesupposedly bourgeois morality that terrorism is inherently morally objectionable, in favourof a morality that terrorism is wrong if it serves the interests of the ruling class againstthe working class, and right if it helps capitalists smash pre-capitalist social formationsas a necessary step along the way to arriving at socialism through the full working outof capitalism.4 That kind of line is one we reject on many levels – for its teleology, itsdeterminism and its endorsement of the morally repellent practice of terrorism. The factthat terrorism is not an abstract thing but a specific social relation has been grasped atsome levels by critics of the war on terror, but its full implications have not. Accordingto a leader in The Independent (2001) newspaper: ‘You cannot declare war on a tactic: itis as if President Roosevelt responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor by declaring war on

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bombing’. To take the point further, Terry Jones (2002) put it this way: ‘How do you wagewar on an abstract noun?’ (see also Crichton 2007).

Critiquing terrorism in this way opens up numerous productive lines of enquiry. Forexample, Timothy Bewes (2002, p. 12) pointed out that the classic quote from Marx andEngels provided above about capitalism’s tendency to sweep away even the newly con-ceived before it can ossify, suggests that capitalism is, in this sense, a de-reifying force.Perhaps, drawing on the HM concept of contradiction (in which social forces pull inopposing directions at the same time) and the CR concept of generative tendencies, capi-talism both reifies and de-reifies, thus shutting down some potentially emancipatory spaceswhile opening up others. Nick Couldry maintains that neoliberalism comprehensively dom-inates the contemporary world and that ‘neoliberalism evacuates entirely the place of thesocial in politics and politics’ regulation of economics’ (2010, p. 2). Certainly, neoliber-alism involves a greatly intensified drive towards commodification as a necessary part oftransforming all that it can reach as objects to be bought and sold in market relations.

If neoliberalism is the most reifying form of capitalism there has been, it is in thisrespect the version of capitalism most conducive to resort to terrorism, whether to enforcecapitalist class rule or to (in a self-defeating manner) attempt to oppose it. And yet, inanother contradiction, it also contains other generative tendencies towards forms of ruleand subjectivity that can work against resort to terrorism. The notion of some pre-reifiedpast leading to a reified present that might be replaced by a de-reified future sounds sus-piciously teleological. Perhaps it makes more sense to think of ourselves as inherentlyinhabiting the contradiction of managing to de-reify in some ways, but getting caught upin reifications in others, with our relationship to both structured yet dynamic and chang-ing (Bewes 2002, pp. 11–12). CR-informed HM lends itself to countering reification withits focus on change, on generative tendencies and on the relational, even as we reflect onwhether its abstractions about these changing, tendential relations may be unable to avoida degree of reification in a dialectical, contradiction-filled process.

Trotsky hits the nail on the head about the willingness of ruling elites to label anyresistance to them as ‘terrorism’, while excluding state-sanctioned mass slaughter fromtheir pontificating about the illegitimacy of violence and the absolute value of human life.Another leading HM theorist and political activist Karl Kautsky (1919, especially ch. 7)wrote an extended essay on terrorism shortly after the 1917 Russian Revolution that con-tained numerous propositions that we can examine further for their possible adaptationto the contemporary world. He distinguished between the terrorism deployed in ad hocfashion by desperate and already-brutalised mobs, and the systematic, planned use of ter-rorism by states ‘in order to grind down elements ... which seemed to those rulers to bedangerous’. Furthermore, rulers who used such tactics, he observed, can simultaneously be‘highly cultivated men who were filled with the most humane feelings’. When terrorismis used ineffectively, he suggests that the consequences are liable to be different for therulers and the ruled. The rulers for the most part retain power and privilege despite theblood and fear, whereas the ruled, in creating political–economic disruption by attempt-ing revolution through terror, are liable to find themselves in still greater misery. This isanother reason to doubt the emancipatory value of resort to terrorism. When the ruled douse terrorism, it may anyway be as a mob led by elements of the more privileged but inse-cure sections of society: there are echoes of this in the events of the 1990s in Rwanda andformer Yugoslavia (Mueller 2000).

Kautsky’s critique of terrorism is above all an exploration of the differential relation-ship to values of classes within capitalism and underlines our argument that HM providesresources for a normative rejection of terrorism. He argued that ruling elites can resort to

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effective use of terrorism without feeling the strain of dissonance with their own valuesbecause the use of terrorism is consistent with their values, whereas the use of terrorism inthe French Revolution of 1789 was so contrary to the values of that movement that it under-mined the revolution from within. We have provided reasons above for thinking that thesenegative consequences will inherently be the case for those struggling against the negativeconsequences of capitalism. Kautsky perceived the shift in the nineteenth century amongthe masses from a mob to an organised, more conscious working class as an essentiallyhumanising dynamic that would enable it to abandon its resort to futile terrorist tactics. Ifthat pattern exists at all now, it is difficult to see it, although it is possible that it exists inparticular places. The issue is much more one of trying to make sense of a world which hasadvanced consumer capitalism and liberal democracy intimately mixed with securitisedpoverty, both locally and globally. But within that changed context, the question remainsas to how to advance the interests of those who are in diverse respects bearing the costs ofglobal neo-liberalisation, in the understanding that resort to terrorism can be expected tohave an anti-emancipatory effect on social relations.

Conclusion

CTS has achieved a great deal in a short space of time. Those achievements could beextended further with the resources provided by CR and HM. CR helps us at the levelsof philosophy and methodology by relating epistemological relativism (we can know thesocial only indirectly through our interpretation of it) to ontological realism (there is apowerfully influential social reality that includes but is much more our knowledge claimsabout it) through judgemental rationalism (knowledge claims can be tested against socialreality, although always in an indirect, interpreted and fallible manner). Furthermore, CRcharacterises social reality as having three levels: our knowledge claims about its nature,social reality as it exists now and potential social reality. CR-informed HM provides a sub-stantive theory that can contribute to the ability of CTS to understand the world and theroles of terrorism and discourses about terrorism within it. Crucial to any emancipatoryproject is the idea of change, and this approach is a major resource in understanding howchange happens. CR-informed HM shows that capitalism constantly remakes the world, inpart by means of thinking that goes far beyond status quo-orientated problem solving. Itcan also be used to explore how terrorism can be an instrument of capitalist class rule: thisdoes not mean that it is always or solely a means of such rule, of course. It also helps usunderstand how the use of terrorism involves the kind of reified thinking that it is inher-ently anti-emancipatory. There are areas of common ground and potentially fruitful mutuallearning between CR-informed HM and all other categories of CTS perspective even wheremajor disagreements remain.

AcknowledgementsThe authors thank Jonathan Joseph, Richard Jackson, Terrell Carver, the Critical Security StudiesReading Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University ofBristol and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes1. We have no reason to think that the balance of CTS-type pieces that have been published in

other journals and in other forms will be dramatically different from that indicated in that table.

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2. We use the labels HM and Marxism broadly interchangeably, but mostly use the former asthe latter label tends to focus the discussion more specifically on the work of Karl Marx andFriedrich Engels. For an overview of what HM has to offer security studies generally, seeHerring 2010. For more on CR and HM/Marxism, see Brown et al. 2002.

3. Paul Wilkinson (forthcoming), a key figure in MTS, has also taken up the issue of state terrorismrecently. His cases are Saddam Hussein’s policies towards the Iraqi Kurds; Indonesia’s policiestowards the East Timorese; former Yugoslavia; and Rwanda in 1994. In writing about Indonesiaand East Timor, he shows himself to be willing to discuss the state terrorism of an ally of theWest. How exactly he handles that case, and whether and how he engages with the idea of useand sponsorship of terrorism by liberal democratic states, or with their relationship to capitalistglobalisation, remains to be seen when his book is published.

4. Marx himself can be quoted as speaking and writing both for and against the use of terrorism.He wrote approvingly in 1848 of ‘Revolutionary Terrorism’ and in 1849 of ‘red terror’ as theonly means of accelerating the overthrow of the old order, but in 1870 wrote approvingly of thenon-resort to violence by the proletariat. See Kautsky 1919, ch. 6.

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